Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume 1: The Poetry of Desire, 1749-1790

The author of Faust, the best-selling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of exquisite lyric poetry (set to music by Schubert and Mozart), and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, poems, and treatises, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

Considered by Nietzsche to have been `not just a good and great man, but an entire culture’, Goethe was as vital a part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German social and political life, as he was its cultural nucleus. However, as this perceptive biography shows, the originality of his art lay in his complex distance from his times.